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The Next Big Thing You Missed: A Social Network That Could Truly Reform Our Schools

Submitted by adminsnn on Thu, 06/19/2014 - 00:03

The federal government has spent 12 years trying to impose reform on primary and secondary schools from above, using things like financial incentives and standardized tests. Edmodo is working from the other direction, hoping to improve our schools from the bottom up.>
Edmodo is a social network specifically designed for primary and secondary schools, offering a way for teachers to more easily assess students and trade tips. At a time when many teachers feel hamstrung by standardized tests and associated performance standards, Edmodo helps them exchange techniques in a peer-to-peer, ad hoc fashion. It also provides a relatively unfettered playground where they create and share educational videos and software that can compete with the Facebook posts, texts, YouTube videos, and others things that distract students from their work.

In other words, it makes school look more like the rest of our lives.

“K-12 is an incredibly change-resistant system, and to be disruptive, you have to do it in the least disruptive way possible,” says co-founder and chief product officer Nic Borg.

The approach seems to be working. Edmodo, launched in 2008 by two former computer administrators for Chicago-area schools, now counts 35 million users, including students and parents as well as teachers. That’s up from 15 million last year and 1 million at the end of 2010. It has now signed up more than 60,000 schools and school districts, including 91 of the 100 largest districts in the U.S., where three quarters of its users live.

One Thousand Lonely Islands
Borg and co-founder Jeff O’Hara were inspired to create Edmodo by their own work in public schools, where they saw web apps and other systems that had no real impact on the classroom. Part of the problem was schools were using software designed for higher education, where students are left behind if they don’t keep up. Primary and secondary school teachers simply don’t have that option and needed software that was more flexible, allowing a teacher to slow the pace of learning if a class was struggling with the material.

‘EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THE POWER AND THE TRANSFORMATION THAT DATA AND TECHNOLOGY CAN BRING TO THE CLASSROOM, BUT IT WAS ALL FRAGMENTED INTO 1,000 LONELY ISLANDS.’
The other big problem: most educational software programs and the data they generated was isolated. Teachers weren’t learning from one another, and the software they used wasn’t improving based on usage patterns. Meanwhile, outside of education, social systems like Facebook and LinkedIn were flourishing by connecting people and evolving in tandem with their online habits. Young children were barred from such systems, which, in any case, didn’t provide the privacy and moderation systems you’d want in a classroom setting.

Indeed, Borg came up with the idea for Edmodo after spending a lot of time blocking access to social sites like YouTube and Facebook. “Everyone talks about the power and the transformation that data and technology can bring to the classroom, but it was all fragmented into 1,000 lonely islands,” says Borg. “It was just creating more work for teachers.”

Borg and O’Hara began working on Edmodo at night and on weekends, often from O’Hara’s basement. Their goal was to create a simple, intuitive way for teachers and students to connect within the classroom in much the same way they were increasingly connecting with friends beyond it—on social networks like Facebook. The pair launched Edmodo in late 2008 with a tweet directed at fellow early adopters in educational tech. The first year disappeared in a haze of activity as the duo raced to keep up with feedback from teachers scattered across the country. In 2009, as the tool got more popular, Borg and O’Hara quit their day jobs and raised a seed round from Learn Capital, an education fund backed by publishing giant Pearson. The next year, the pair had relocated to Silicon Valley.

The Idea Share
Available on the web, iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, Edmodo became a social network that connects teachers to students and, to a lesser extent, parents. Teachers can use the system to issue assignments to students and to accept completed assignments digitally. They can also create interactive quizzes and share educational content such as videos. Meanwhile, students can talk to their whole classroom as part of a group, or one-one with teachers, but not directly to each another. Parents can create accounts and follow what their students are working on and where they might be struggling. They can also receive broadcast messages from their child’s teacher.

As the network took off, Edmodo brought on Crystal Hutter, a former Oracle engineer and investment manager at eBay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Network. First as COO then as CEO, Hutter has helped reconcile the ad hoc, grassroots spirit of Edmodo with the buttoned-down realities of the education system. Since her arrival, Edmodo has added tools that let school and district administrators to do basic account management and track use of the service.

But, at the same time, the company has also worked to help teachers communicate with each other. They can connect one-on-one or in teacher-only groups focused on particular subject areas, and for the past three years, Edmodo has run an annual conference that brings together teachers from around the world using streaming video. “If I’m teaching third graders,” Hutter says. “I want all the other third grade teachers in my school or in the district [online] where I can connect with them, share ideas, and get best practices I can instantly implement with my classroom.”

A Better Textbook
One result of this teacher-to-teacher network has been the rise of viral educational materials on Edmodo. Fifth grade teacher Robert Miller of Volusia County Florida, for instance, created a series of popular videos which show chemicals about to be combined or a chemical reaction in progress and ask students to guess what will happen next before getting the answer in the next video. Teachers liked the video series, the company says, because it sparked energetic online discussions among students trying to solve the chemical riddles. “You could see the sheer enthusiasm of the students,” Hutter says. In similar fashion, the site has become a hub for educational apps. According to the company, around 600 apps use its programming interface.

Now, Edmodo is poised to launch its first revenue-generating tool, Snapshot. This is a set of quizzes designed to help teachers quickly evaluate how well their students are progressing against the Common Core Standards, the formal educational standards and test in English and math set to debut in the upcoming 2014-2015 school year. It will also recommend content and resources to improve student performance against the standards. Though Snapshot will be free for teachers, Edmodo anticipates offering premium tools at the school and district levels.

The hope is that the site can provide more insight into what’s working and what’s not. “We buy textbooks every several years, and we don’t know if they’re used. We don’t know if they’re effective. We don’t know what parts are effective,” Borg says. “We’re moving to a world where you can look at specific experiences and specific students and understand what’s working for particular types of learners.” We can also show, he says, that empowering teachers is “the only path to getting better outcomes.”

Correction 13:15 EST 06/17/14: An earlier version of this story said that Edmodo now has 30 million users and that the idea for the site started with Jeff O’Hara. The site now has 35 million users, and the idea began with Nic Borg.

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